Personal Belief System and Reading Models
Reading Belief System Philosophy As a young student I was always a struggling reader, which in return also made me hate reading. When I have students in my own class that struggle with reading and tell me how much they hate reading I am all too familiar with their struggles. It wasn’t until I was older that I enjoyed reading books on my own and found comfort in the stories I fell in love with. I did not understand where my hate and frustrations came from until I was an elementary school teacher. Now, it is my goal to help students found their personal passion for reading earlier in life than myself. Every student has their own interests, some enjoy fictional books, while others enjoy learning about different topics in non-fictional books. It isn’t my job to tell my students what their favorite genre is, but instead to teach them about the different genres and help them find the one they relate to the most. Even if they read a non-fiction book about bears and absolutely hate it, at least I helped them discover something they don’t like, which can now be used to help them select books from the library they will enjoy on their own. Furthermore, I want my students to view reading as a privilege, not a punishment. It wasn’t until I became a teacher that I realized reading was always used as a punishment when I was in elementary school, and that is not a way to make a student enjoy reading. When I was in 4th grade I learned about Harry Potter, but at this point I still hated reading and the shear thickness of this book scared me away. It wasn’t until my 5th grade teacher introduced my class to Harry Potter that I really started to enjoy it. She saw how much we were struggling to read the books so she bought the tapes. Every day, as a reward, we got to listen to one chapter on tape. At first, I was not at all thrilled by this reward as I hated reading and would have rather watched a movie. However, her own excitement for the books and have the assistance of the books on tape slowly got me more and more interested. A month into reading the book on tape I started to look forward to hearing what happened next. I slowly started to gravitate to my teacher more and more at recess just to ask her questions about the story and even ask her about unknown vocabulary words. She noticed my interest and called my mom, who surprised me with my own book at home. This is when I first enjoyed reading, and I owe it all to my 5th grade teacher, who not only inspired me, but helped spark my interest further. In my Kindergarten classroom, I find that I most closely align with the interactive reading model, which is a combination of the top-down and bottom-up methods (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, & Lenhart, 2006). Most of my students start school without ever attending VPK or preschool, so many come in not having any type of phonics skills and have never even been taught how to hold a book properly. This is where the bottom-up method is utilized and we spend a good amount of the first half of the year learning basic print concepts and letters and sounds. I slowly introduce concepts from the top-down method as well, but this takes us a few months to get a good handle. I spend a lot of time in whole-group and small group instruction activating prior knowledge with my students. While this proves to be difficult as they are very young and don’t have many experiences yet, I try and focus on experiences we have already gained from school activities. Picture walks are also a very important tool I teach in whole group and small group instruction as well by modeling this so that they can do this independently with their reading buddies. This helps the students understand what the story is about and how the characters feelings change across the pages. This also leads us to discover author’s purpose in the second half of the year, which helps the students understand the words they should see on the pages and why the author chose the words he wrote on each page. All students, even in Kindergarten, develop their own learning styles. Reading is one of the most important skills a student will learn, and is arguably one of the most difficult skills to teach. By providing students with a variety of resources and tools we can give students the opportunity to not only learn to read, but also let them develop their own passion in reading. As a Kindergarten teacher, I believe it is my job to start my students off on the right path to becoming great and passionate readers. References Vacca, J. A., Vacca, R. T., Gove, M. K., Burkey, L. C., & Lenhart, L. A. (2006). ''Reading and learning to read ''(9th ed.). Boston: Pearson/ Allyn & Bacon.